Myth of the American Sleepover

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Add in the matchless ennui of an adolescent summer--the sense of the clock of life slowing to a crawl as you wait and wait to enter adulthood--and you have the ingredients of The Myth of the American Sleepover. This debut film of writer-director David Robert Mitchell (who himself grew up in suburban Detroit and shot the film there in 2008) is a rambling sleepwalk through the last night of a teenage summer: a woozy mix of inexplicable urges and disappointingly bland events, a fruitless grasping for something just out of reach: meaning, connection, love.

Sleepover, written by Mitchell in 2002 by stitching together semiautobiographical sketches from prior years, was released in 2010 (mostly on the festival circuit), and makes its Ann Arbor theatrical debut at the Michigan October 8. It will strike most viewers as weirdly anachronistic: no characters have a cell phone or a computer, a boy has an actual world globe in his room, the girls at a sleepover play on a Ouija board, and one girl discovers another girl's been sleeping around by reading her diary in a dresser drawer--not on Facebook.